A few weeks ago I taught a class for IBM and had some interesting
discussions in the class. Actually two of my students in particular
gave me food for thought and connected some missing dots for me. The
first was a woman who was a lead architect for one of the largest
professional services organization in the world. For the sake of
simplicity I will call her the architect. The second was one an
original employees that came out of a Silicon Valley startup that was
purchased by IBM a few years ago. I will call him the entrepreneur. As
always I look for the angles, and I started to talk to the woman
architect about me possibly doing some on demand teaching to other
professionals in her organization. She liked my ideas and gave me some
contact names. However, she also offered me some advice. She said – if
you are going to try and sell them on this training you might want to
tell them how you can help them with a hot topic they were all using
called reusable IP.
Hmmm! I have built a few professional services organizations and those
two simple words kind of crystallized what I would call the holey grail
of processional services.
Later in the class I struck up a conversation with the entrepreneur.
We talked about what most ex-entrepreneurs always talk about – we made
fun of VC’s. Some where along the way I told him that when ever I spoke
to VC’s it was as if I was speaking German and they were speaking
Japanese. There was no “Love-Connection”. I told him about a visit I
had with an OSS ESM Nagios based startup I had last year out in San
Francisco. I told him that the meeting went great at first. The founder
loved my ideas, the architects loved me and the visit was going great.
However, my last meeting was with the CEO (a VC plug-in). Needless to
say it didn’t go well. When I told the entrepreneur who the company was
he said - holy cow – the CEO of that company is my best friend. At this
point he was a little confused to what could have gone wrong. He had
been sitting in my class all week and he was convinced I knew my stuff
and it didn’t make sense knowing his friend – the CEO. Then he asked me
if I minded telling him what the idea was that I proposed. So I told
him what I was selling was using their open source ESM product as a
Trojan horse as entrée into the Big4. We would go after low hanging
fruit via service offerings and integration projects and work to get
the software sales on the back-end once we were in the door. This was
all based on my long standing philosophy of the three R’s (references,
revenue, repeatable-revenue). I also told the CEO that this is a new
world. The old world of selling software is gone and the new world is
one where its not clear the difference between services and software.
—– stop right there the entrepreneur said. That’s were you lost him
because you offended the VC police. No one within 100 miles of Silicon
Valley is an allowed to use that word. If any one in that valley is
caught using the word “services” the VC’s will come and lock em up. I
tried to explain that the OSS (Nagios) ESM company I was meeting was
currently selling services at a 3 to 1 ration (i.e., 15k per software
deal with 30k add on services). Doesn’t matter they are in denial – he
said. They just can’t stand that word. Then I told the entrepreneur
that I wasn’t talking about regular services, I was talking about
repeatable services, in fact “Reusable IP”.
The entrepreneur then asked me - did you use those words during the
meeting. I said no… Then, there you go – he said – that is where you
lost the battle.
Where’s the IP
A friend of mine recently asked me what IP means to me. I use the
acronym a lot and I know it can mean a lot of different things. Instead
of regurgitate wikiepedia let me give you a few snips of what I think
of when I use the letters IP. A few years ago I was doing some Tivoli
consulting for the Navy in Hawaii. The hotel I was staying at had a
little Ukulele shop. Each afternoon when I came home from work I would
walk past the shop and peek in the window. One day I stopped in and
asked the shop keeper if he could show me a few chords on the ukulele.
He hemmed and hawed and seemed annoyed. Then he told me he is not
really a teacher and he really didn’t want to do it. Then I told him
that if he showed me just a couple of chords I might buy one.
Reluctantly he handed me a cheat sheet that had about 6 chords on it. I
fumbled for a few minutes and then broke out playing and singing a
killer rendition of “Brown Eyed Girl” by Van Morrison. The shop keeper
looked up in amazement and asked me if this was the first time I had
ever played a ukulele before. I told him that yes it was the first time
and that was a true statement. What I didn’t tell him is that I hade
been playing the ukulele’s six string ancestor, the guitar, for over 30
years. That my friends is what I am talking about when I use the term
IP.
I’ll give you another example. If you do a search on Google for
resumes of people who can install Tivoli monitoring you will find
hundreds of resumes. However, there are less than 30 who can actually
make it work. It’s the same software why can’t those hundreds of
consultants make it work. Young consultants that work for me are always
amazed when they show me some new software program that is written in
Python or Ruby I can scan it quickly and tell exactly what the program
does and why. What they don’t realize is that I spent my first 10 years
of my career coding assembler and the language is the least significant
part of the program. One of my favorite authors is the Italian
philosopher Umberto Eco (Name of the Rose, Foucault’s Pendulum). He
writes all his novels in Italian however I have read all of his books
in English and I have had no complaints. So when I look at the OSS ESM
market and hear Nagios vs. ZenOSS or Groundwork vs. Hyperic what I look
for is the IP around those products. What does the vendor’s service
internal and external organizations look like? How much IP is there
around the implementations using the vendor’s software? If it’s ZenOSS,
Hyperic, GroundWork, Nagios, or Zabbix who cares
John Willis
johnmwillis.com
